Naturally, humans see with their eyes and work with their hands. Indeed, human bodies are equipped with a pair of eyes that are provided on their faces and pointed in a forward direction. The eyes are configured to receive light from direct or reflected sources, and to transmit signals regarding the received light to the brain, where such signals may be processed and associated with one or more still or moving images. Likewise, a human body is also bestowed with a pair of hands, each of which is provided on distal ends of arms that are mounted to a torso by a pair of shoulders, and the motor cortex of the brain may control the coarse or fine movements of the arms, the wrists, the hands or fingers. Therefore, by virtue of immutable aspects of their physiological construction, humans have organs for visually sensing conditions of an environment in which they are situated, viz., their eyes, that are provided approximately two to three feet, on average, from organs for performing one or more tasks, viz., hands. The distance between such organs is usually defined as a function of an individual human's arm and/or neck length.
Occasionally, humans must perform tasks on a subject using their hands in situations in which a clear line of sight between the eyes and the subject is unavailable or at least partially obscured. For example, a human may be required to reach into a cluttered toolbox in order to retrieve a small tool, or into murky pond waters in order to search for a lost jewelry item. Similarly, humans may also perform tasks on small materials or items, or within confined spaces. In such situations, the distance between the human's eyes and the human's hands may act as a functional impediment to the proper performance of such tasks.
Computer systems are commonly used to register or otherwise acknowledge the presence, transfer or arrival of an item, an object, a person or a thing using one or more scanners or readers, which may be configured to acknowledge or optically recognize text, numbers or other identifiers (e.g., a one-dimensional bar code or a two-dimensional quick response bar code, or “QR” bar code) that may be printed, written, affixed, marked or otherwise associated with an item, an object, a person or a thing. Such scanners or readers may be used in any number of environments or facilities such as airports, shopping malls or warehouses, where such scanners or readers may optically scan, read or otherwise evaluate an airline ticket, an item for purchase, or a shipment of items that has arrived or is scheduled to depart.
Originally associated with large, fixed consoles or machines, scanners or readers are now typically associated with handheld computing devices or other grippable machines. After obtaining an item, holding or gripping the item in one hand, and locating an identifier affixed or labeled thereon, a worker may scan or read the identifier with the handheld scanner or reader. Although the use of a handheld scanner or reader may efficiently register or acknowledge the presence, transfer or arrival of items, objects, people or things, the actual use of such systems or devices may result in some unexpected or undesired circumstances. For example, a worker's manual use of a handheld scanner or reader to identify items typically requires the worker to stop his or her motion, to place an item in a field of view of the scanner or reader with one hand and to command the scanner or reader to capture an image of a portion of the item with another hand. The break in motion, and the described events, must be repeated for each and every instance in which an item is to be recognized.